The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

covering the entire history of art from Diego Velázquez to Joseph Beuys and Philip Taaffe. On the walls are works by Miquel Barceló and Keith Haring. The whole chalet smells like a florist’s shop. Everywhere there are gorgeous flower bouquets in green vases left over from Rich’s birthday—roses, tulips, lilies; all of them white, his favorite color.
    We are joined by his girlfriend Dolores “Lola” Ruiz, whom he calls “
mi más bella flor
” (my most beautiful flower). What at first sounds perhaps a bit affected turns out to be something quite different when I discover who Lola really is. The Spanish-Russian intellectual with a degree in philosophy is writing a book about her famous grandmother Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, the legendary secretary-general of the Communist Party of Spain. During the siege of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), she coined the slogan “
¡No Pasarán!
” which soon became a global antifascist rallying call. Her nom de guerre was “La Pasionaria,”the passion flower. Ernest Hemingway immortalized her in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, his novel about the Spanish Civil War, which was made into a film with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. One of La Pasionaria’s most often quoted lines goes “It is better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.” Reformulated, the line fits her granddaughter Lola’s partner quite well: It is better to go down in freedom than to spend a single day in an American prison.
    After a lunch of chicken with potatoes and green beans, I sit with Rich on the sofa in front of the panorama window. We drink a 2000 Rioja Imperial Reserva from CVNE, Rich’s favorite wine. “It’s a clean wine,” he says curtly. The heavy wine, pressed from Spanish Tempranillo grapes, is not a status-symbol wine from Bordeaux. In St. Moritz you can buy a bottle for roughly thirty dollars. A fugue from Johann Sebastian Bach sounds from the speakers, and a frozen Lake Silvaplana sparkles before us in the rattling cold. The glimmering blue Piz Corvatsch casts its shadow over the valley.
    “My father.” Rich answers my question without hesitation. “My father is definitely the person who influenced me most. We fled from Belgium, and he managed to build up an important business from zero.” He then begins to tell me a story—a story of poverty and riches, power and morality, politics and genius. His story, and in many ways the story of oil in the past and the future.

 

     

a
JEWISH FATE
     

    D
avid Reich bought his first automobile, a used black Citroën, on Wednesday, May 8, 1940. He sensed that very little time remained for himself and his small family. Only wealthy people were able to afford a car at that time, but David Reich was by no means rich. The thirty-eight-year-old shoe retailer spent virtually his entire savings on the used vehicle, yet the purchase did not fill him with pride. Not at that point in history. Not as an Orthodox Jew in Belgium.
    The writing on the wall was clear enough for those who wanted to read it. The German
Wehrmacht
had just overrun Denmark and Norway, and eight months previously, in September 1939, Nazi Germany had invaded Poland. It was the beginning of World War II, which was soon to develop into the biggest and deadliest conflict in human history. It was probably only a matter of days until the German troops would also attack France via Belgium. By the spring of 1940 it was easy to predict what would then happen to a Jewish family. The racist Nuremberg Laws, which systematically discriminated against and disenfranchised the Jews, had already been in force in Germany since 1935. Books by Kurt Tucholsky, Upton Sinclair, Sigmund Freud, Anna Seghers, and Lion Feuchtwanger had been publicly burned. Jews were effectively excluded from economic,political, and social life in the German
Reich
. Following legal discrimination and the expropriation of Jewish property, the
Kristallnacht
in November 1938 signaled the start of their physical persecution as well.
    Adolf Hitler’s notorious speech on January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his takeover of power, was heard on radios and seen in the weekly newsreels in cinemas. The words tumbled out of the dictator’s mouth in the Reichstag as he screamed, staccato, “If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a